Currently browsing posts about: Antibiotics

For years, as Tom Philpott recounts on his new food and agriculture blog for Mother Jones, public health advocates have fretted about the use of arsenic-containing drugs to kill intestinal parasites and promote growth in chickens.

One such drug is roxarsone, made by Pfizer. Its arsenic is in the organic (carbon-containing) form, which is less toxic than the inorganic form.

But, as the New York Times explained, evidence has been accumulating that the organic form can change into the more toxic, inorganic form, a known carcinogen.

Last week, the FDA announced that the agency had done its own feeding tests. Chickens fed organic roxarsone had higher levels of inorganic arsenic in their tissues. The FDA got Pfizer to “voluntarily” withdraw the drug from the market.

The surprise here is not the FDA’s delay in dealing with this drug. The big surprise is that the FDA did its own testing. As the Times put it:

The F.D.A. once routinely conducted its own studies of animal and human drugs, but limited budgets led the agency to eliminate much of its scientific and laboratory capacity over the years. The roxarsone study is a triumph for agency scientists but one unlikely to be repeated very often. The agency asked for $183 million in additional funds for food safety efforts next year, but House Republicans have instead proposed cutting $87 million.

Drug companies cannot be expected to do their own testing if there is any chance that the tests will show something not in their best interest. If independent federal agencies don’t do these kinds of studies, who will?

I can remember when the FDA housed a group of researchers doing outstanding work on food allergies in the 1990s. The FDA closed down that lab when it was given additional responsibilities by Congress with no additional funding.

The FDA is a public health agency. Its job is to protect the public against unsafe food contaminated with bacteria or antibiotics such as roxarsone. The agency gets high marks for taking this on. And Congress needs to support the FDA’s research mission.

I was interested to read FoodSafetyNews this morning and learn about the FDA’s new count of the number and pounds of antibiotics used to promote the growth of farm animals used as food.

Because this is the first time the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine has produced such a count, it is not possible to say whether the numbers are going up or down. But the agency is now requiring meat producers to report on antibiotic use so we now have a baseline for measuring progress.

Misuse and overuse of antimicrobial drugs creates selective evolutionary pressure that enables antimicrobial resistant bacteria to increase in numbers more rapidly than antimicrobial susceptible bacteria and thus increases the opportunity for
individuals to become infected by resistant bacteria. Because antimicrobial drug use contributes to the emergence of drug resistant organisms, these important drugs must be used judiciously in both animal and human medicine to slow the development of resistance. Using these drugs judiciously means that unnecessary or inappropriate use should be avoided….

In regard to the use of antimicrobial drugs in animals, concerns have been raised by the public and components of the scientific and public health communities that a significant contributing factor to antimicrobial resistance is the use of medically important antimicrobial drugs in foodproducing animals for production or growth-enhancing purposes.

The overuse of antibiotics in farm animal production was a key focus of the 2009 report of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production. Our conclusion: the overuse of antibiotics in animal agriculture is an enormous risk to public health and should be stopped.

The FDA report may be short and issued without comment, but it is a sign that the FDA is taking steps to address this serious public health problem.

I’ve been collecting items on food safety for the last week or two. Here’s a roundup for a quiet Friday in July:

Antibiotics in animal agriculture

USA Today does great editorial point/counterpoints and here is one from July 12 on use of antibiotics as growth promoters or as prophylactics in farm animals and poultry. This selects for antibiotic-resistant bacteria. If we get infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria, too bad for us.

USDA and UC Davis investigators are still trying to figure out how the toxic E. coli O157:H7 got onto the spinach. Investigators did not find the bacteria on the spinach field itself, but they did find it in water, cattle, and cattle feces at a cattle crossing over a stream one mile away. Leading hypotheses: runoff from that stream or wild boar.

Subsequent studies showed low levels of E. coli 0157:H7 in wild animals and birds. A new study confirms that just under 4% of wild boar harbor the bacteria.

The investigators say the spinach outbreak of 2006 was the result of a combination of circumstances: “Everybody is starting to realize that maybe unusually heavy rainfall prior to planting could be an issue in terms of where water is routed.”

Dairy farming is moving into California’s Central Valley in a big way. Runoff from those farms will not be sterile and growing vegetables along water routes may be risky. Compost, anyone?

The chemical behind Kellogg’s cereal recall

Kellogg recalled 28 million packets of breakfast cereals last month because people reported funny smells and getting sick from something in the packaging. At first, Kellogg would not say what the chemical contaminant might be.

Tom Philpott’s comments on Grist.com point out what’s really at stake: “And of course, the real scandal is what Kellogg’s is marketing to kids: a tarted-up slurry consisting mainly of sugar, corn products, partially hydrogenated oil, and food colorings. But that’s a whole different story.”

Salsa and guacamole are sources of foodborne illness

The CDC reports that salsa and guacamole are becoming more frequent sources of contaminants leading to illness. CDC started collecting information on sources of outbreaks in 1973. Its first outbreak due to salsa or guacamole occurred in 1984. Since then, there have been 136 such outbreaks. Restaurants and delis were responsible for 84%. Between 1984 and 1997, salsa and guacamole outbreaks accounted for 1.5% of total foodborne outbreaks. But the percentage rose to 3.9% from 1998 to 2008.

Moral: make your own!

China deals with melamine in milk powder

China is taking creative steps to prevent melamine from getting into milk powder and infant formula. To discourage fraudulent producers from boosting up the apparent level of protein in milk with melamine, it simply reduced the amount of protein required.

The latest on food irradiation

FoodSafetyNews.com presented a two-part series on food irradiation (part 1 and part 2), both of them quite favorable to the technology. As I discuss in my book, Safe Food, I don’t have any safety ojections to food irradiation, but I consider it a late-stage techno-fix for a problem that should never have occurred in the first place.

I conclude with my favorite quote from former USDA official Carol Tucker Foreman: “sterilized poop is still poop.”

I served as a member of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production which issued its final report in April 2008. Our most important recommendation: reduce the widespread use of antibiotics as growth promoters and as a routine method of preventing infections. Why? Because of increasing evidence of human resistance to the kinds of antibiotics used in farm animal production and to related antibiotics.

You think everyone involved in production of farm animals understands the dangers of continued overuse of these drugs? Not a chance. A coalition of 20 meat producing groups has asked Congress not to restrict their use of antibiotics. The American Meat Institute has issued a statement condemning our report. The American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) has done even more. It just issued its own report taking on the Pew Commission’s antibiotic recommendations. Why the ferocity and why now? Congress has submitted a bill – the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2009 (PAMTA) – that would restrict use of several antibiotics in farm animal production.

Ralph Loglisci, who was the Pew Commission’s communication director, has an excellent blog post dealing with the AVMA statement. If you want to understand what all this is about, take a look at it.

While these debates continue, antibiotic-resistant bacteria are increasingly turning up in our food supply. Tell your representatives to support PAMTA!

If you take the Washington, DC Metro this month, be sure to look for the posters at the Capitol South and Union Station stops (the ones closest to the Senate and House staff offices). The ads are part of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming, aimed at reducing the use of antibiotics in animal agriculture. Take a look at who is “hogging our antibiotics” and encourage your representatives to do so too.

The Pew Charitable Trusts has launched a new website on overuse of antibiotics in industrial production of farm animals. It summarizes and references four aspects of the antibiotic problem: the problem itself, the threat to human health, and actions needed to improve oversight and legislation. A good resource! And it links to the report on industrial animal agriculture production done by a committee of which I was a member. Use and enjoy!

In a full-page ad in today’s New York Times, Tyson Foods announces that all of its Tyson brand fresh chicken will be raised without antibiotics and marketed as “100% All Natural Chicken Raised Without Antibiotics–No Hormones Administered and No Artificial Ingredients.”

Tyson deserves applause for taking an important step toward greater food safety. Use of antibiotics as growth promoters increases chicken growth rates by about 10%, but non-therapeutic use of antibiotics increases antibiotic resistance in chicken bacteria. Resistant bacteria can spread to poultry workers, their families, and beyond, meaning that if the bacteria make people sick, the antibiotics will be useless as treatment. Tyson is a huge company that sells more than $26 billion worth of beef, chicken, and pork annually. If it eliminates non-therapeutic antibiotics, other companies may be encouraged to do the same.

The ad implies that only Tyson brand chicken is eliminating antibiotics and that its traditional chicken–undoubtedly the vast majority of what it produces–will continue to be treated with these drugs. If so, Tyson is positioning this particular chicken as a premium brand quite likely to be sold at a premium price. Watch for this at your grocery store.

As for No Hormones Administered: A footnote in tiny print at the bottom of the illustrated package label says “federal regulations prohibit the use of hormones in chicken.” Chickens are never treated with hormones anyway.

Finally, “100% All Natural” simply means that the chicken has no artificial ingredients and is minimally processed. It does NOT mean that the chicken is Certified Organic or that the chickens are raised under uncrowded conditions, an issue I discuss in the What to Eat chapter titled “Meat: Organic versus “Natural.”